Reinventing the Wheel: Why no-tech ancient civilizations still can't catch up.

The parent to your post didn't propose going about establishing them, he was just pointing out the advantages.

    Whatever the side effects may have turned out to be,
    the  British empire certainly did not set out to
    "empower ordinary individuals who will create new
    and unforeseen technologies out of old ones."

Decentralize governance, establish an intelligent government with some democratic elements if there isn't currently one, and expand internationally by taking control of areas that are grossly misgoverned. China could put Burma under better governance, for instance. Or anyone could put North Korea under better governance.

> Superpowers pitying undeveloped countries and nominating themselves as Imperial rulers as the only solution to their plight sounds rather self-serving, don't you think?

Well, it would have to serve a successful country for them to put lots of resources into the project. I think the more important question is, could it work? I think the answer to that is yes. People point to some wrongs done by Britain or Rome, not mentioning that many of the places that wrongs were done were much worse before going under British rule. Again, I'm not claiming it's a perfect model - just that it outperforms a lot of other models of government.

The problems with the British Empire (and other imperial Empires) resulted from an approach more or less the polar opposite of the fanatical evil cult of the Third Reich: it was essentially government determined mainly by influential individuals' profit motives. Food exports and protectionism whilst part of the population starves happen frequently with home-grown regimes; the problem is one of distribution of wealth and influence and not of remoteness or ethnic differences. And you'd be hard pressed to show me a country that _didn't_ use brutal tactics, including against civilians, during warfare; the chief novelty of the British concentration camps was that they kept records of casualties and fiercely debated the appropriateness of the tactics they used

Being part of the Roman Empire probably offered many advantages - certainly being a Citizen had numerous advantages, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_citizenship. Similarly being part of the British Empire presumably also had advantages. So the real work of establishing decentralized imperial republics is going to be in the social and adminstrative functions applied after the dust of conquest has settled.

This approach seems to the one followed in Iraq and Afghanistan but the Western powers do not seem to be quite so competent as the Romans.

If you're citing divide-and-rule don't quote Iraq. It has 5 races in it, 2 very dominant religions and several suppressed ones (it did once have a history of Christianity and Buddhism). The recent problem of Iraq is that it wasn't divided and the only thing keeping it from all-out civil war was one of the most fascist dictators in recent history who had a policy of if you get out of line you, your family and your friends die or disappear.

Cyprus is another bad example of 'dividing' it was a country that was held together by geographical location not by national identity. When the problems occurred, Turkey tried to intervene, but had to pull out because they were under threat of Soviet invasion (who had interest in Cyprus) and the US clearly stated they wouldn't help in a military invasion of the Turkish homeland.

Where decentralized British rule worked was where it was used. India and Hong Kong are the two countries you purposely failed to mention who have been doing fantastically after British rule. To mention that HSBC was the only bank operating in the UK that survived the global recession was in no way due to the rules the British established in Hong Kong where HSBC started.

Too soon to tell. If you told people that Japan would be the second largest economy in the world thirty-five years after WWII, people would've thought you were crazy. I wouldn't be surprised if Baghdad is a top international city in, say, 2045.

> Let's not forget the long-term effects of British rule in places as far-flung as Ireland, Cyprus and - of course - Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. A policy of divide-and-rule led to pretty awful consequences.

Well, Iraq and the Middle East is actually a good example in the other direction - it was ruled by the Ottoman Empire fairly decently for quite a while (it did get corrupt and ugly at the end). Anyways, I don't say it's a perfect governance or all roses all the time, just that it's outperformed most other models on most key metrics.

Apples and oranges. We overthrew the dictator, but we didn't conquer the country--at least, not overtly, the way an empire would. A full-on conquest, made by a federalized empire with experience of conquest, would be entirely different.

(Not necessarily better, but different enough that you can't easily extrapolate.)

Except the British Empire DIDN'T collapse. Rather the British decided that running an empire was actually more trouble that it was worth, and it was converted to what is now the Commonwealth in an orderly and deliberate fashion, and Britain enjoys good relations with the vast majority of its former colonies.

[1] It was the Empire that fell, the Republic wasn't around any longer to fall.

It's actually not that complicated. Yes, having representatives from a place in the government is a good thing. The lack of this representation is why the American colonies fell out with Britain, for instance.

Self-rule has good things, but has been taken too far - yes, Zimbabwe's much worse now than it ever was when it was British Rhodesia. A functional local government might be superior to a functional foreign government. But a functional foreign government is far superior to local rule-by-madman. I don't see how anyone could prefer Mugabe to Cecil Rhodes.

And yeah, dysfunctional. No need to put it in scare quotes - I think anyone sane can agree places like North Korea, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Burma have dysfunctional governments.